Farm Occupiers in Zimbabwe Warn of War

Militant black former guerrillas in Zimbabwe said Thursday that they are ready to go to war and would even fight to overthrow President Robert Mugabe if his government moves to halt their seizures of white-owned farms.

“We have a history of fighting for our land. We have reached a point of no return,” said Agrippa Gava, a director of the Zimbabwe Liberation War Veterans Assn., an organization that claims to represent about 50,000 former fighters.

Veterans of the bush war for independence and other squatters armed with spears, axes, knives and guns have invaded 549 farms this month, but they have since abandoned 116.

Mugabe announced Friday that the squatters could stay on land they occupied, but his government is coming under increasing pressure to stop the takeovers, which experts say could hurt farm production.

About 4,000 white farmers own a third of the nation’s productive land. About 1.5 million black families live on the other two-thirds.

Andrew Ndlovu, another veterans association official, said ex-fighters loyal to Mugabe’s ruling party would overthrow any new government by returning to a bush war if Mugabe were to be defeated in elections scheduled for April.

Ndlovu said the association also would seize power if the ruling party prevented veterans from “repossessing” ancestral lands from whites.

“Should the party fail us, we would rather go into a military government for a period of five years to set things straight,” he said.

The veterans’ ability to carry out their threats was questioned by the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change.

Farmers whose properties have been occupied this month say many of those claiming to be veterans were far too young to have fought in the 1970s bush war for independence that left about 40,000 dead, mostly black fighters.

Gava, addressing a meeting of civic groups and farmers’ leaders, said his organization warned Britain in January that veterans would seize land from the descendants of British settlers unless the former colonial power bought farms and gave them to poor blacks.

The warning, contained in a letter to Queen Elizabeth II, said British authorities could avert a “blood bath coming up soon” by paying for white land.

The British government did not acknowledge that it received the letter, Gava said.